Why American Education Is Failing

Two new, crucial, and interrelated skills will control the fate of
American education: (1) How to more deeply motivate growing youngsters;
and (2) How to systemically address parental growth and family
issues.

Last year, the president of IBM called all U.S. governors together
and got them to agree that establishing national standards is the way
to solve America's educational woes. Clearly, they believe the problem
is underachieving American teachers, students, and parents, who simply
need to be held to a higher standard.

But the late W. Edwards Deming, who is credited with transforming
Japan's industry into world leadership, brilliantly taught business
leaders how to distinguish between problems caused by an underachieving
system, as opposed to those caused by underachieving workers. When
asked what he thought of America's educational system, he replied, "It
is horrible."

In 1962, as a dedicated teacher, I suffered a crisis of conscience
when I realized I was part of an educational system that was failing
kids everywhere. This led to my founding a private school in Bath,
Maine, to explore more deeply the process of how youngsters are
effectively prepared to live meaningful lives. Here is what I believe
the 30-year experiment at my school has uncovered:

Motivation holds the key to educational success. Horace Mann noted
that, given a year to teach spelling, he would spend the first nine
months just on motivation. The Hyde School experiment rediscovered that
the deepest human motivation is self-discovery. We learned to
appreciate why the ancient Greeks stressed the dictums "Know thyself"
and "Become what you are."

Hyde found that at about age 13, our deeper intellectual, physical,
emotional, and spiritual capacities begin to empower us to fulfill a
unique and larger vision of ourselves; and further, that adolescence is
to serve as its foundation. Just as we will not grasp algebra without
first mastering the fundamentals of arithmetic, so we will not fulfill
our larger selves without first discovering and developing our deeper
intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual resources during this
critical period.

This comprehensive human-growth process is well beyond the scope of
our present educational system, which essentially expects to motivate
student achievement through the vision of better jobs and more money.
As powerful as these ego motivations might seem, they fail to reach the
deeper and more spiritual motivations and resources in students. In
fact, this system distracts students from their deeper self-discovery
motivation by unwittingly encouraging their more instant-gratification
ego motivations--often expressed in drugs and alcohol, sex, cigarettes,
aggression, image, cliques, vandalism, shoplifting, cheating, and other
negative outlets.

Moreover, this system's narrow and shortsighted focus on academic
achievement unfortunately favors certain inborn abilities and learning
styles, which often results in widespread resistance, apathy, and even
hostility in students. If we study the varied human learning styles
based on the individuation theory of psychiatrist Carl Jung, we will
realize that the learning styles of only 12.5 percent of us really fit
well in traditional classrooms. If the rest of us hope to succeed in
schoolwork, we must scurry around adjusting our more innate approaches
to thinking and learning. This may help explain why years of schooling
play such a limited role in how most of us actually conduct our
lives.

But the American business-university complex has sold the
public--and therefore our politicians--on the idea that "world-class
academic standards" hold the key to America's future. Therefore,
test-score "achievement" will increasingly dominate our schools, thus
further exacerbating America's continuing conflict between what it
rigidly defines as "academic excellence" and the reality of America's
wide diversity of individual potential.

The losers? Many of those who fail to adjust their diverse learning
styles to fit the system. Some who get stuck in family dysfunctions
that nobody addresses. Others that lack the kind of family support that
is almost essential to success in our system. And all of this is
producing growing hordes of kids who get seduced into what our
wrongheaded system has helped create: today's overpowering and
hedonistic youth culture. Kids are born with a deeper spirit that will
seek to express itself; if we don't give it a right path, it will
usually take whatever it can get.

If we were to examine the educations of all those who actually
achieve excellence and fulfillment in life, we probably would be
shocked by how many had rebelled against our narrow system, and instead
listened to their own inner calling. Do we know the number of Thomas
Edisons, Orville Wrights, Albert Einsteins, and Eleanor Roosevelts who
made it in spite of us, and who ended up leading most of those who
trusted our system?

A recent poll indicates that students also overwhelmingly want
higher academic standards. Why? Just for the sake of "getting a college
degree." The study sadly reports: "The vast majority of youngsters
showed little curiosity or sense of wonder." Do we really believe our
system will somehow magically transform such kids into dynamic
individuals in life?

If our system is in fact failing to help American students discover
and develop their deeper potentials, then when they become parents,
they will likely support the same faulty indoctrination of their
children.

Is this happening today? Our experiment in Maine found that
effective child rearing depends on parental growth. A child cannot
raise a child; effective parents need to learn: (1) how to "let go" of
their own unproductive childhood experiences and attitudes; (2) how to
let go of their own parents; (3) how to grow emotionally and
spiritually, as well as intellectually and physically, en route to (4)
pursuing the discovery of their own deeper selves and larger purpose in
life. Few American parents today have experienced this deeper growth.
So how can "national standards" address this deeper systemic problem?

Kids are born with a deeper spirit that will seek to express
itself; if we don't give it a right path, it will usually take
whatever it can get.

The Hyde concept, which has now been successfully tested in public
schools, first and foremost seeks to draw upon the powerful
self-discovery motivation in students. Its "Character First" process
builds on the premise that each of us is gifted with a unique potential
that defines a destiny.

This premise gains further strength by renewing America's commitment
to the dignity and worth of each individual. It radically restores
character development as a school's primary task. (As Heraclitus noted,
"Character is destiny.") This in turn firmly centers the entire
educational process on the family; because in character development,
parents are the primary teachers, and the home the primary
classroom.

Our work has proven that this simple intrinsic rather than extrinsic
focus can dramatically transform education as it is practiced in
America today:

It creates a strong student-teacher-parent bond; character and
unique potential are primarily developed by example, so parents,
teachers, and students alike individually participate in the overall
process.

It leads students to realize that their many ego responses to the
present achievement system are counter to their deeper desire to
fulfill their true selves.

Students dramatically come to expect the best in each other; they
help each other maintain high academic and ethical standards.

Character excellence inevitably leads to academic excellence;
while we do not prescreen students academically, 97 percent of our
graduates have matriculated to four-year colleges.

Teachers can be trained to fully oversee the Character First
process in just three years; in fact, we have observed teachers
leading students and colleagues after only a six-day workshop.

But this is hard stuff. It requires both parents and teachers to
realize that they themselves grew up in the wrong system, and that now
they must lead by the example of their own changes and growth. We find
that students, in time, gratefully and enthusiastically respond to this
leadership. And in every case so far, when the parent "gets" the
concept, so does the kid, although not always by graduation time.

The choice is ours. We can buy the national-standards solution,
blame the school "workers," and hold them responsible through test
scores. Or we can finally begin to act like Americans, roll up our
sleeves, and inspire growing kids by our own example of growth. I
guarantee they will follow.

By
Joseph W. Gauld

Joseph W. Gauld is the founder of the Hyde School in Bath, Maine, and
the author of Character First: The Hyde School Difference (San
Francisco: ICS Press, 1993). The Hyde School's home page can be
accessed on the Internet at http://www.hyde.pvt.k12.me.us.

Vol. 16, Issue 30, Page 41

Published in Print: April 23, 1997, as Why American Education Is Failing